Meet the Author

As an award winning blogger, David Butler helps others explore the world of craft beer in Northern Colorado. Fermentedly Challenged helps you find great places to enjoy a beer, listen to music, enjoy a meal and find a discount on your next pint. Follow along on social media - @ChipperDave on Twitter and on Facebook.

Monday, August 15, 2016

Colorado has a love affair with the India Pale Ale (aka the IPA). IPAs are loosely based upon the old beer styles created in Great Britain and Europe that was made with extra helpings of hops that helped to preserve the flavor and quality of beer shipped across the globe. Before the advent of craft breweries, America brewed most of its beers without a lot of hops, but now that there are over 4650+ craft breweries out there, the hops are back in beer in a big way.

Colorado is one of the biggest producers of IPAs in the nation today. In Northern Colorado alone, there are least 80 breweries in Boulder, Larimer and Weld counties that produce at least 1 or more IPAs. There are many ways to refer to an IPA - a traditional India Pale Ale, a West Coast-style IPA, a New England-style IPA, a Cascadian-style IPA, a Colorado Pale Ale, an American Pale Ale, etc...

Then there's the many different ways to make IPAs like: fresh-hop or wet hop, single hop, cloudy vs clear, single IPA, double IPA (DIPA), imperial (IIPA), triple IPAs, fruity IPAs, CO2 vs Nitro IPAs... Colorado loves 'em and embraces them all!
With so many different styles and ways to make an IPA it's hard to keep track of them all. Fermentedly Challenged took a survey in July 2016 of the many different IPAs out there in Northern Colorado and put them together in a table and captured it all in the images below. This is just a sampling of the hundreds of different IPAs available today. How many of these have you tried? Which of these are your favorites? Scan the lists below and then chime in on Facebook with some of your favorites.

A List of Northern Colorado IPAs

Note: Several of these beers are not year-round offerings and may have been one-time specialty releases. Some NoCo breweries do not make an IPA. A few breweries have remarkably made 20 or more different IPA recipes. This list is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather merely an indication of the variety of IPAs that are out there. There are some that were probably missed, but the majority of them were captured here at the time the survey was made.